6 December 2010
Cloned meat and the Daily Mail
We have an unusual relationship with the Daily Mail here at nef. The politics of many, though not quite all of us, would rule out giving Lord Northcliffe’s offspring house room. On the other hand, the Mail – and the Mail alone – has run with many of the most important new economics campaigns, including the ghost towns and small shops.
The Northcliffe Press’s Save Our Small Shops campaign was imaginative and genuinely indicative of what people really want – not just what the politicians say they want.
So whatever you might think of the politics of the Mail, and we can’t really let them off the hook for their vilification of foreigners, you can’t help admiring their strength of purpose on a handful of issues where the technocrats might want them to say something else.
So, again, it is the Daily Mail alone, which has been running with the story about Caroline Spelman, the Defra Secretary of State, and her decision to OK the sale of cloned meat and milk in UK shops.
The decision is a disaster for animal welfare. We don’t know much about cloned animals, but we do know that their lives are short, dysfunctional, crumbling and painful. It is a slap in the face for the real food sector and small farm sector, which is one of the jewels in the crown of UK entrepreneurship – and critical to the future of so many local economies.
It is a miserable capitulation to the agri-business lobby, which will make a few corporate much richer but will make many people here, and the local economies they depend on, much poorer.
Sustainable local economies relies on imagination, and the space to innovate. This decision risks driving them aside in destructive mega-farms. But what really beggars belief is the decision to rule out labelling.
We also know is that the majority of people in this country would prefer not to eat cloned meat. Now apparently they will be denied the chance to find out, to use their choice, to exercise their spending power as they see fit.
It is a depressing day for those who broadly support the coalition. To have a decision that not just rejects free and open markets but allows corporate food to smother the resurgent small food sector.
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Comments
09 Dec 2010 at 10:39
Jeffrey Vernon
'We don’t know much about cloned animals...' This should have been your starting point, not Daily Mail hysteria about cloned meat, a meaningless expression. As far as I can tell, a cloned cow has been mated to a conventional bull, and some of the offspring are being farmed. I expect that this valuable cow will continue to breed, so her life will probably be no more short and miserable than a normal cow's. Her mother would have been selected to produce clones for certain qualities of her milk and meat and disease resistance. The new calves will be her grandchildren, so to speak; they are born and reared like any other calf. You might argue for choice and labeling, or complain about the squeeze on small producers, or ask if the meat tastes better, but all this superstitious horror about an agricultural breeding experiment undermines your aim to comment intelligently on new developments. And if you want to stop your opponents blinding you with science (whether it's a question of novel foods, power generation, drug development...) it would help to learn something about the technology. The Sustainable posture (or worse still, journalism) comes across as a kind of shrug - 'I was never any good at that kind of thing' - and it can only take you so far.09 Dec 2010 at 16:26
DavidBoyle
You write as though the squeeze on innovative small producers, and the wealth they bring to local economies, was somehow a side issue compared to the technology. I'm never going to know enough about the technology to comment on that. But I do know about the economics, and the consequences on productivce economies of the kind of scale that is envisaged here. And for those of us who believe this is important, shouldn't we get the choice about whether we buy it or not? David09 Dec 2010 at 20:33
Jeffrey Vernon
The Squeeze, and Flavour, and Choice are all reasonable positions to take. Daily Mail drivel about Cloned Meat is not. If you go along with a tabloid campaign, when you have no interest at all in the difference between so called frankenfood and the stuff we already eat, the novel foods lobby will run rings round you. The technology is essentially an IVF procedure; the egg is fertilised not by a sperm, but by a cell from the animal you want to clone. The calf is born, the cow is reared, and you eat her offspring (which are themselves born entirely normally). Like most science, it's easier to grasp than economics. You could avoid the issue altogether by insisting on labelling. You don't care what it means for the calf's mother to have been a clone, you just want to know if it was. Incidentally, I'd be surprised if 'innovative small producers' aren't planning to use clones; it would be a way of rederiving endangered or extinct varieties of pig or cow from tissue banks, like using 18th century apple seeds from a botanical collection.